How old-school tech is rewiring drone warfare in Ukraine

Russia was the first to use fiber-optic drones in the war and deployed them to retake parts of the Kursk

- Matthew Luxmoore & Nikita Nikolaienko

The drone slipped under a bridge and edged toward a human-shaped object resting on a platform inside one of its cement supports. Through its camera, the Ukrainian pilot saw a sleeping Russian soldier wrapped in a red blanket, apparently oblivious to the deadly machine buzzing beside him.

The ambush that killed the Russian last month was only possible because the drone was guided by a fiber-optic cable that allowed the pilot to maintain a direct connection behind the tons of concrete.

Such ingenious attacks are taking place across the east of the country, where Ukraine is trying to blunt Russia's grinding advance with a new generation of quadcopters steered by long coils of ultrathin and highly versatile wire.

As Russia and Ukraine battle to gain an edge on the battlefield, fiber-optic drones are a distinctly old-school response to the way both sides have used electronic warfare and physical barriers to make most ordinary craft ineffective.

Instead of using radio signals that can be easily blocked, fiber-optic drones transmit data back to the pilot through the cable they unspool as they fly.

"If it wasn't for those drones, I'm not sure what I'd be doing right now," said a top pilot with Ukraine's 68th Brigade's Dovbush Hornets, which carried out the bridge ambush that killed several Russians. "Fiber optics is a lifeline."

The rapid pace of technological innovation that has accompanied the war makes the arrival of fiber-optic drones seem like a logical development.

A shortage of artillery shells since 2023 has forced Ukraine to increasingly rely on millions of so-called first-person-view—or FPV—drones, which are equipped with a camera and a small explosive to take out enemy soldiers, weapons caches and armored vehicles.

But their reliance on radio signals has made them an easy target for electronic-warfare systems positioned all along the 600-mile front line and mounted atop vehicles across eastern Ukraine.